Is A Denial Of Service Attack Ethical Because The Company That Does Them Says So

from the seems-a-bit-questionable dept

We saw all the stories yesterday about the "new" anti-spam system that would launch a denial of service attack on spammers and figured it wasn't really worth mentioning, because we'd already covered this topic back when much more recognizable companies Lycos and IBM experimented with similar offerings. So, while it was amusing to see trade publications call this late-to-the-game effort "dumb as a bag of hammers," it didn't seem all that interesting. This morning, however, it was amusing to see someone named Rob submit a link to an article that seems to have believed every marketing statement coming out of the company, and crowned it as "a do-not-spam registry that might work." However, the part that caught my attention was the claim in the article that, despite the concerns of just about everyone else who commented on this plan, the system of vigilante attacks on spammers was "ethical." Why? Because the company's CEO told them so. The problem, of course, with any of these systems is that there is no recourse for a site that gets knocked out by this system. So, any smart spammer will simply start spamvertising sites of people he doesn't like -- leading them all to get a denial of service attack from this so-called "ethical" system. The CEO says that won't happen because his company's staff monitors what sites are being hit -- but that just makes them the private, unaccountable judge, jury and executioner of sites they don't like.

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Incidentally, the InformationWeek blogger who made the "dumb as a bag of hammers" comment seems to think that the Blue Security software sends email complaints to the spammers, which shows a lack of research. The "easily spoofed" email headers he blogs about are utterly irrelevant to the Blue offering.